It's Christmas Day! Many of you are awash in gift wrap, opening up your pants' top button after a big meal, or cozying up on the couch where you plan to dive into a great novel.
Even if Christmas isn't your style, you've likely had some celebration this time of year ... and struggled to get the writing done. But that's okay! You'll get back to it soon.
In the meantime, whatever holiday you're celebrating this season, we are taking this moment to wish you all the best from the Writers in the Storm team.
Ellen
My wish for you this holiday season is a bright light to shine the way to your next big ideas. May the muse bless you with boundless creativity and may you be energized by the love and support of the people in your life.
John
My wish for the readers this holiday season is to have the vision of a hunter in an outhouse at night, the courage of a paratrooper jumping over a cactus patch, the tenacity of an octopus escaping an aquarium (again), and the success of baby taking its first step.
Julie
May you feel proud of how far you've come in your writing journey, whether baby steps or big leaps; gratitude for both your successes and failures, which have molded and made you the strong writer you are; and the love and support of good friends and family. Oh, and may you get that last piece of pie! You deserve it.
Jenny
I wish you a wonderful holiday filled with people you love. And I wish you peace. Peace has been in short supply for many of us over the last year. For some, that might mean more time unplugging. For others, more reading and free time. More time to exercise and take care of you, perhaps? I hope you get whatever helps you feel renewed as we move into the new year!
Kris
Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season full of joy, hope, and the spirit of giving — enough to last the year through.
Do you have a Christmas wish you'd like to share? We really really hope it comes true!
I started playing around with writing in 2010. I joined a critique group about a year later, and with a few exceptions for LIFE, we have met every two weeks to exchange pages. In that time, three of us signed with agents (myself included), one of us self-published three books.
The two who also have agents have published two stand-alone MG novels with a YA to come out 2021, and the other has published a YA historical fantasy trilogy with a stand-alone also coming out 2021 (yes, I secretly hope they have the same release date…). I still linger in the status of agented.
If you have been on social media at all in the last few
weeks, you’ve likely seen either “the decade is coming to an end, how will you
finish?!?” or “share the great things you did this last decade!” conversations.
While they can be fun and inspiring, if you aren’t quite where you wanted to
be, it can be frustrating. Demoralizing. Self-doubt inducing. Somehow, I don’t
think this is a just me situation.
So, as you are looking beyond the holiday season, however
you celebrate, I would like to encourage you to block out some time away from
loved ones, some time when you can sit, on your own, and do a couple things:
1.
Go find a piece of writing as close to the
beginning of the decade as possible.
Read it.
How far did you get before you could see things you could make better? Why do you think you see that now when you might have thought it was pretty good before?
My friend, it’s because your understanding of writing has gotten better, deeper. You understand nuances of the craft you didn’t know then. Just like we often have to put marks on the wall to show our children they are growing, we need to let ourselves see where we were before to see how far we’ve come.
2.
Jot down the projects and pieces you have worked
on throughout this decade.
I don’t care if it won a contest, got you your agent, if
that piece initiated a relationship with a publishing house, or if it won
awards. Everything you have written counts.
On a piece of paper, write what you learned while writing that piece. Did you think you were a YA author and started writing and realized the voice felt wrong (this was me)? Did you learn how to write a new POV, how to draw out the emotional potential of a scene or chapter or book? Did you learn about pacing and how to make the reader lean in? Did you learn a new form of organization? If you learned it, write it down.
3.
Imagine chatting with someone who is just
starting their writing journey.
Pretend they just asked you how it all works. Can you outline what CP and POV and beta readers are? Do you know about query letters and synopses and what R&R means? (if you don’t, I’m giving you some hints.) Did you know what this was a decade ago? Who are you following and interacting with on social media that you didn’t know a decade ago? What advice would you give to this person about how to start, what to expect?
Did you realize you knew as much as you did?
4.
Identify things you don’t know or don’t practice
like you’d like to.
One of the funny things about the writing world is there are people who can’t wait to have an agent, an editor, a deadline. And there are authors with all those who sometimes yearn for the days they weren’t writing with deadlines. The grass is greener and all that.
If you are not as dedicated to your craft as you’d like to
be, what might you do to make those changes? If you are dedicated to your
craft, are you still having fun with the creation?
If not, why? This isn’t to say you will go from a person who
staggers out of bed at 7:00 to a member of #5amwriters overnight (seriously,
you’ll make it three days. Don’t try this). And this isn’t to say that you
dismiss contractual obligations because that book just got hard (they are ALL
going to get hard).
But it is a good time to ask yourself how this whole thing
would look, in an ideal world, for you. A couple of 20-30 minutes sessions of
writing? Two dedicated hours? A “dessert” thing you dabble in when you have met
your obligations for the day?
Now, here’s where it gets really tricky…
5.
What is the ONE thing you can do to start toward
that goal.
Prior to WWII, the word priority wasn’t plural. Ever. You
didn’t have a priority list, you had a priority. You didn’t have your top
priorities, you had a priority.
Flip to a new document or a new piece of paper and write down where you’d like to be. Then work backwards. If you have lots of projects you’ve started but never finished, you may have the goal of finishing. But you aren’t going to do that in a day or a week or likely even a month.
What do you need to do in order to finish? What has prevented you from finishing before? What modification can you make to allow yourself time and space to get a little closer to that goal? What do you need to do during January 2020 to help you do this? What do you need to do January 1–4 to help you do this? What do you need to do today to help you do this? What can you do right now to help you do this?
And so on. You go smaller and smaller until you see the one thing that will help you start toward your goal. It might be watching a show AFTER you’ve met your writing goal. It might be gradually guiding yourself toward being a morning person (15 minutes earlier, 3-4 days at a time, please). It might be that you stay at work 30 minutes later, or go to work 30 minutes earlier.
As someone who lives in the real world, I know this isn’t going to ideally happen every single day. It just won’t. So as you are striving toward your goal, you have to give yourself some grace and remember you are striving, working on, practicing. And when a setback happens, see if it was preventable, and if not, que sera and try again tomorrow.
You have done amazing things. You will go on to do amazing things. Remember to set goals you have control over (this basically means don’t say sign with, publish with, have books made into ... you don’t control that), go backward until you find the one thing, and then keep at the practice.
What did you realize you have learned this last decade? Do you know what you are thinking about for your big goal in the upcoming year? What is the one thing you can do to baby step toward that goal?
About Tasha
Tasha Seegmiller believes in the magic of love and hope, which she weaves into every story she creates. She is the president of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and studying in the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University, and teaches composition courses at Southern Utah University. Tasha married a guy she’s known since she was seven and is the mom of three teens and co-owner of a cotton candy company. She is represented by Annelise Robey of Jane Rotrosen Agency.
Description, run-on words, similes and metaphors are all ways to get your meaning across to your reader. I got the first two, but metaphors and similes....they were a bit fuzzy (school was a looooong time ago for me). Until I watched this scene from Renaissance Man, with Danny DeVito (if you've never seen it, you're missing out). I'll never confuse them again. Watch. We'll wait.
https://youtu.be/UBlMLlfJrRc?t=45
If you watch to 2 minutes — you've got it.
Simile = "like" something—comparing one thing to another. Metaphor = this IS that. Got it? Okay, but how can all this junior high English help strengthen your writing?
If you've read WITS much, you know I have a theory that extra words water down a scene, rather than strengthen it. I espouse "write tight." Comparisons are a shortcut. If you want something to hit home, but you need to do it fast, this is how. But the right comparison can do even more; it can add life to your scene. It puts the reader in the scene, because they've experienced the comparison.
This is from my WIP, The Road to Me. Nellie is an 84-year-old grandma.
Nellie is perky today, leaning forward, hands on the dash like a little kid going to McDonalds.
I could have described the look on her face, her movement, or her body language. But in comparing her to something disparate, can you "see" her excitement? Instead of telling you she's excited, the simile shows that she is. And the fact that it compares her to a child adds a tiny hit of humor, punching the power to a higher level.
I glare at Nellie, the picture of innocence. Her mouth is a machine gun with a hair trigger.
Metaphor: her mouth IS. And comparing it to something dangerous shows that the POV character fears what Nellie will say. This is making your words to double-duty, and it makes your text rich—meaty.
Speaking of, Margie Lawson taught me another comparison short-cut: Eponym – to substitute a name for an attribute. It takes some thinking, but it's a very short shortcut, and it can be powerful. You have to be careful to choose references all readers will understand though, or it flies over their heads.
Her dad’s Atticus Finch to Junior’s Vinnie Gambini.
Those are the basics. But here's where the fun comes in. You can pile up comparisons to move the character forward; to show their train of thought, that ends at a station of epiphany (see how I snuck in that comparison? God, I love this). Here's another example from The Road to Me:
It’s terrifying to think of going back to ground level where everything I’ve built is teetering over my head.
But I’m beginning to believe that’s exactly what I must do.
If I can muster the courage. But if I swept all I have into a pile, would it be enough? If it isn’t, what then? Like at the edge of the Grand Canyon, where the ground crumbled away from my feet, vertigo slaps me. Leaving the science behind would be like leaping off that canyon wall, trusting that I had wings, in spite of the mirror, telling me I don’t.
A leap of faith.
It terrifies me.
But so does failure.
I still have to work on it a bit—I like the shaky building comparison, but it's just a bit off from the vertigo comparison. But the point is, these pile up and take her to the letting go and flying, which is exactly where her journey has led her, and what she MUST do to get everything she wants. My hope is that I've taken the reader to that edge and had them look over—they're experiencing the fear that the character is. Only you can tell me if I succeeded.
But can you see the advantage of using comparison as a shortcut to make your writing stronger?
If so, my job here is done.
Have you found this device to be helpful? Would you share a comparison from your work or others'?
About Laura
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